The time is ripe to consider what 21st-century digital citizens should know about artificial intelligence (AI). Efforts are under way in the USA, China, and many other countries to promote AI education in kindergarten through high school (K–12). The past year has seen the release of new curricula and online resources for the K–12 audience, and new professional development opportunities for K–12 teachers to learn the basics of AI. This column surveys the current state of K–12 AI education and introduces the work of the AI4K12 Initiative, which is developing national guidelines for AI education in the USA.
A Note to the Reader
This is the inaugural column on AI education. It aims to inform the AAAI community of current and future developments in AI education. We hope that the reader finds the columns to be informative and that they stimulate debate. It is our fond hope that this and subsequent columns inspire the reader to get involved in the broad field of AI education, by volunteering their expertise in their local school district, by providing level-headed input when discussing AI with family and friends or by lending their considerable expertise to various decision makers. We welcome your feedback, whether in the form of a response to an article or a suggestion for a future article.
– Michael Wollowski, AI in Education Column Editor
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Envisioning AI for K-12: What Should Every Child Know about AI?
The ubiquity of AI in society means the time is ripe to consider what educated 21st century digital citizens should know about this subject. In May 2018, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) formed a joint working group to develop national guidelines for teaching AI to K-12 students. Inspired by CSTA's national standards for K-12 computing education, the AI for K-12 guidelines will define what students in each grade band should know about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. The AI for K-12 working group is also creating an online resource directory where teachers can find AI- related videos, demos, software, and activity descriptions they can incorporate into their lesson plans. This blue sky talk invites the AI research community to reflect on the big ideas in AI that every K-12 student should know, and how we should communicate with the public about advances in AI and their future impact on society. It is a call to action for more AI researchers to become AI educators, creating resources that help teachers and students understand our work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1846073
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10132840
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 33
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 9795 to 9799
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract To date, many AI initiatives (eg, AI4K12, CS for All) developed standards and frameworks as guidance for educators to create accessible and engaging Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning experiences for K‐12 students. These efforts revealed a significant need to prepare youth to gain a fundamental understanding of how intelligence is created, applied, and its potential to perpetuate bias and unfairness. This study contributes to the growing interest in K‐12 AI education by examining student learning of modelling real‐world text data. Four students from an Advanced Placement computer science classroom at a public high school participated in this study. Our qualitative analysis reveals that the students developed nuanced and in‐depth understandings of how text classification models—a type of AI application—are trained. Specifically, we found that in modelling texts, students: (1) drew on their social experiences and cultural knowledge to create predictive features, (2) engineered predictive features to address model errors, (3) described model learning patterns from training data and (4) reasoned about noisy features when comparing models. This study contributes to an initial understanding of student learning of modelling unstructured data and offers implications for scaffolding in‐depth reasoning about model decision making.
Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic
Scholarly attention has turned to examining Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy in K‐12 to help students understand the working mechanism of AI technologies and critically evaluate automated decisions made by computer models.
While efforts have been made to engage students in understanding AI through building machine learning models with data, few of them go in‐depth into teaching and learning of feature engineering, a critical concept in modelling data.
There is a need for research to examine students' data modelling processes, particularly in the little‐researched realm of unstructured data.
What this paper adds
Results show that students developed nuanced understandings of models learning patterns in data for automated decision making.
Results demonstrate that students drew on prior experience and knowledge in creating features from unstructured data in the learning task of building text classification models.
Students needed support in performing feature engineering practices, reasoning about noisy features and exploring features in rich social contexts that the data set is situated in.
Implications for practice and/or policy
It is important for schools to provide hands‐on model building experiences for students to understand and evaluate automated decisions from AI technologies.
Students should be empowered to draw on their cultural and social backgrounds as they create models and evaluate data sources.
To extend this work, educators should consider opportunities to integrate AI learning in other disciplinary subjects (ie, outside of computer science classes).
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As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prominent in children’s lives, an increasing number of researchers and practitioners have underscored the importance of integrating AI as learning content in K-12. Despite the recent efforts in developing AI curricula and guiding frameworks in AI education, the educational opportunities often do not provide equally engaging and inclusive learning experiences for all learners. To promote equality and equity in society and increase competitiveness in the AI workforce, it is essential to broaden participation in AI education. However, a framework that guides teachers and learning designers in designing inclusive learning opportunities tailored for AI education is lacking. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides guidelines for making learning more inclusive across disciplines. Based on the principles of UDL, this paper proposes a framework to guide the design of inclusive AI learning. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify AI learning design-related frameworks and synthesized them into our proposed framework, which includes the core component of AI learning content (i.e., five big ideas), anchored by the three UDL principles (the “why,” “what,” and “how” of learning), and six praxes with pedagogical examples of AI instruction. Alongside this, we present an illustrative example of the application of our proposed framework in the context of a middle school AI summer camp. We hope this paper will guide researchers and practitioners in designing more inclusive AI learning experiences.more » « less
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Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance teachers' capabilities by sharing control over different parts of learning activities. This is especially true for complex learning activities, such as dynamic learning transitions where students move between individual and collaborative learning in un‐planned ways, as the need arises. Yet, few initiatives have emerged considering how shared responsibility between teachers and AI can support learning and how teachers' voices might be included to inform design decisions. The goal of our article is twofold. First, we describe a secondary analysis of our co‐design process comprising six design methods to understand how teachers conceptualise sharing control with an AI co‐orchestration tool, called
Pair‐Up . We worked with 76 middle school math teachers, each taking part in one to three methods, to create a co‐orchestration tool that supports dynamic combinations of individual and collaborative learning using two AI‐based tutoring systems. We leveraged qualitative content analysis to examine teachers' views about sharing control withPair‐Up , and we describe high‐level insights about the human‐AI interaction, including control, trust, responsibility, efficiency, and accuracy. Secondly, we use our results as an example showcasing how human‐centred learning analytics can be applied to the design of human‐AI technologies and share reflections for human‐AI technology designers regarding the methods that might be fruitful to elicit teacher feedback and ideas. Our findings illustrate the design of a novel co‐orchestration tool to facilitate the transitions between individual and collaborative learning and highlight considerations and reflections for designers of similar systems.Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help teachers facilitate complex classroom activities, such as having students move between individual and collaborative learning in unplanned ways.
Designers should use human‐centred design approaches to give teachers a voice in deciding what AI might do in the classroom and if or how they want to share control with it.
What this paper adds:
Presents teacher views about how they want to share control with AI to support students moving between individual and collaborative learning.
Describes how we adapted six design methods to design AI features.
Illustrates a complete, iterative process to create human‐AI interactions to support teachers as they facilitate students moving from individual to collaborative learning.
Implications for practice:
We share five implications for designers that teachers highlighted as necessary when designing AI‐features, including control, trust, responsibility, efficiency and accuracy.
Our work also includes a reflection on our design process and implications for future design processes.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly pervaded and reshaped almost all walks of life, but efforts to promote AI literacy in K-12 schools remain limited. There is a knowledge gap in how to prepare teachers to teach AI literacy in inclusive classrooms and how teacher-led classroom implementations can impact students. This paper reports a comparison study to investigate the effectiveness of an AI literacy curriculum when taught by classroom teachers. The experimental group included 89 middle school students who learned an AI literacy curriculum during regular school hours. The comparison group consisted of 69 students who did not learn the curriculum. Both groups completed the same pre and post-test. The results show that students in the experimental group developed a deeper understanding of AI concepts and more positive attitudes toward AI and its impact on future careers after the curriculum than those in the comparison group. This shows that the teacher-led classroom implementation successfully equipped students with a conceptual understanding of AI. Students achieved significant gains in recognizing how AI is relevant to their lives and felt empowered to thrive in the age of AI. Overall this study confirms the potential of preparing K-12 classroom teachers to offer AI education in classrooms in order to reach learners of diverse backgrounds and broaden participation in AI literacy education among young learners.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33019795
